When they were out on the land her days began and ended in silence. They seldom spoke. Instead, she learned to direct her attention to his hand signals, his eyes, his posture, so that cooking and chores and normal acts of living could be dispensed with and shared wordlessly. It amazed her how little she required talk and language. Her words sat in her like stones. When she used them at all she recognized their heft, their significance, their import, and she felt a deepening judiciousness in her choice of them. She came to prefer non-verbal interaction. She came to recognize that every word had a silence between it and the next one and that it was within those minute silences that the real communication happened. She felt like an articulate, sentient creature carrying the language of the wind.
One day they lay in a frail drizzling mist watching eight deer grazing in a meadow. He reached into the pack beside him and removed the camera and a long lens. She touched his elbow and motioned for the unit. He looked at her questioningly and then handed it to her. She made the sign for sneaking on an angle into the wind and around the deer to the far edge of the meadow and he nodded. When he moved to join her she held up a palm and gave him a stern face. He studied her briefly, then blinked. She wriggled backwards, then eased up to a deep crouch and scuttled deeper into the trees and began to crouch-walk around the edge of the meadow. The deer were oblivious. She rose and walked into the wind until she could smell the deer and then dropped back into the crouch to creep closer and finally slunk down on her belly and moved furtively forward to a point where she could see them clearly. She wasn’t aware of breathing. She raised the camera to her face and peered through the viewfinder and pulled the deer into focus. A doe and fawn raised their heads to peer off sideways at a sound in the trees and she pulled the focus tight and caught them in profile. She watched them for a while longer then made her way back to where he waited and they rose and walked silently away from the meadow. That night he gave her hide and taught her to cut thong. Then he gave her a thick swatch of felt and showed her how to make her own moccasins.
“You earned these,” was all he said.
She sewed through the night. With each stitch she envisioned herself walking. She saw herself at the moist edges of marshes and amid the loose, dry scuttle of pine forest. She felt the breeze on her skin and the fluttery feel of light rain. She imagined easing through the darkness, through depths of shadow so utter they felt like holes disappearing into the earth, and then regal steps into the jubilant spill of morning, sunrise sudden against everything like a tempera wash, the jewelled look of things dazzling to her. When she finally held the finished moccasins in her hands, the idea of walking had become, in their creation, like stepping into a foreign country, the only maps necessary the soles of her feet. She fell asleep with them crushed to her chest.
* * *
—
Then he taught her to run. They were walking along the edge of a bog lined with scrub pines and pokes of spruce. He raised one hand and stopped. She was behind him. He dropped lower with his weight in his thighs and began to jog with his arms swinging lightly, parallel to the line of his thighs. She mimicked him. She could see how the motion helped him maintain a silent gait and she worked at not breaking it with her clumsy first effort. They carried on that way around the bog and she could feel the sear of effort in her legs but willed herself to keep moving in the dog-like trot. When he turned suddenly and veered into the trees she almost collapsed but righted herself and hurried after him, watching the way he planted his feet and copying the roll of them in the crackle of gravel, rock, and grit. He ran that way for a half-hour. When he stopped she leaned against a tree and hauled breath deep into her. He hardly seemed affected by the effort. When she’d recovered he motioned for them to continue and led them deeper into the bush. The running was harder now. There were tall ferns and downed trees and bramble and sudden fissures in the rock she fought to leap over and still he kept up the relentless pace. The moccasins felt loose on her feet but they did nothing to combat the ache and cramp she began to feel in her legs. But she kept on. He ran them up a long curl that topped a ridge then slowed and rose to his full height and walked to a stone at the edge of the ridge and sat looking out over the vista. She plopped down beside him with heaving lungs and a faintness in her head. It took her long minutes to calm.
“We run like hunters, prowlers, searchers,” he said. “The purpose of running is to run.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not so much. I talked to an old guy one time outside the feed store in town. He was one of the first Indians I ever talked to. We were watchin’ some young kids runnin’ around the schoolyard. He said that for his people, runnin’ was breathin’ in the breath of all things. Running was addin’ our breath to things. To everything. Some of their runners would run for days.”
“What now?”
“Now you learn to run like a creature.”
“How do I do that?”
“By not running.”
“Jesus.”
He laughed. “I hear you,” he said. “But if you watch creatures, especially the hunters, they spend most of their time trottin’ or lopin’ along. They move in starts and stops. They hardly ever run at full speed. Even horses. You can’t gallop a horse for hours. Most of the time you’re walking or going at a light trot. Dogs too. For them and for wolves, top speed’s gotta have a reason. You gotta be able to run like a wolf. Prowlin’. Easy.”
“That’s how you get close to them, isn’t it? Running like that. Like a creature.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Lovin’ the feel of the running.”
Then he stood up and ran. She followed him. She dropped lower and loped in the low, almost casual way he did and held the pace and began to use her eyes and ears and nose so that after a time she wasn’t aware of moving farther as she was aware of moving deeper into the territory she moved through. She saw it. She heard it. She smelled it. She sensed it. And after numerous miles when he stood upright and ran faster through a small ocean of meadow she broke too and they ran full tilt together across that sunlit expanse and into the trees on the opposite side. Laughing.
* * *
—
They ran for weeks. He’d lead her uphill or through long undulating courses along the banks of rivers and streams. They ran plateaus and meadows. They ran from the barn across the pasture and up the curling trail of the ridge. They ran in the evening and they ran in the morning, and she learned to love the feeling of her body in motion. It awakened her to herself. It made her feel keenly alive and so it became like a drug she needed every day and she took to long loping rambles on her own along the concession line that led to town, turning at the Welcome sign to run back. She ran the trails he led her to. Alone. There was no fear in that. Instead, she approached the running the same way she approached the walking and let herself slip into the mystical dream of it, each footfall, each step, each stride a moving deeper into the land and into the country of her own being. She had nights of deep, unmoving, dreamless sleep. She always awoke replenished. Her muscles grew taut and strong and resilient. He showed her how to jump and leap and not break pace, and she began to trust her balance and her lithe strength so that the running became less arduous and more natural, freer, and expansive to her spirit.
“I know why wolves howl,” she said one night while they sat on the porch.
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because it’s the only way they can say how it feels.”
“Bein’ a wolf, you mean.”
“Well, yeah. I guess. But when I’m running I feel the world movin’ through me more’n I feel me movin’ through the world. There’s no words for that. There just isn’t. In those moments, the only thing I want to do is howl.”
THERE AROSE IN CADOTTE THE NEED for solitary prowling. He would sit at the edge of his bed and lace up his boots while Anderson watched and then stand and shrug into his jacket and walk silently o
ut of the room and down the stairs of whichever rickety hovel they sheltered in. There were no words for either of them then. Each understood the smoulder of a seep and bleed beyond words, how it roiled the gut and gripped at the temples as relentless as an encroaching madness. The fire had laid embers in each of them. In Cadotte they flickered harder, brighter, drove him with a banked heat that not even Anderson wanted close to when it rose unaided by booze or talk. So he let him walk. Where he went and what he did was no account to Anderson. There were stories even brutal men had no need to hear.
The truck was no use to him. He wanted the feel of prowling. He wanted the firm set of his feet on concrete and the unfailing push of his energy toward whatever doorway his feral instincts took him. He wanted the sense of motion. He wanted the rise of his hackles in the hunt. The hunch of his shoulders. The bristle of energy in him that brought him eventually to a stillness foreign to those who saw him. His bulk was dwarfed by the implied threat, the primal lurk of him sitting, watching, waiting, silent, set down like a malevolent boulder scarred by unknown impacts. Men let him be. Women, certain women, were drawn to him and it was these he stalked, these he allowed beyond the gaping maw of his hate and downward into his darkness.
When he found them he commanded them just as he had controlled her when they met the first time. Baleful. Terse. Urgent. A geyser shaking earth with its mounting pressure. He revelled mutely in their fear and quaking hold on security, their notions of safety and the inexorable slide into the vortex of his unyielding bitterness and contempt. He took them. He demeaned them. He let them feel his power, his control, his dominance. There was no emotion, only a primitive grunting and finish. There was no elegance. He took them in alleyways, the back seats of their cars, riverbanks, parks, deserted areas slung with rusting hulks of appliances and cars. All that mattered to him was the final act of ruthless disregard: the tossing away, the sneering indifference he threw over them in their slumped and shamed departures. He owned them then. He revelled in that. Then rising to his full height he would shrug back into himself and walk through the detritus of a sleeping city, rich in the fumes of its decay, redolent with the after-taste of abandonment, neglect, and ruinations real and imagined and feared. He existed for those nights of triumph. Striding through the dank shadows, it was her face that drove him. The memory of her body, her touch, the languid feel of her half-drunken sprawl across his skin, and the flat, broad thrum of his palm burning with the hate of it and the searing flush of flame and heat and scorch that drove him onward, deeper into the night.
“THIS PLACE SEEMS TO HAVE QUIETED down a lot,” Roth said.
They were oiling and lubricating the tractor, baler, and wagon in preparation for harvesting the first crop of hay. It was warm and they drank frequently from a large jug of water and the feel of the work lulled them like it always did, that curious sensation of industry, the care and attention to detail, of looking after machines, allowing them to drop lower into a calm, assured set of movements like poetry. They hadn’t spoken for some time.
“Hopin’ Maddie’s seein’ change at school in the girl,” Starlight said.
“Seen her at the post office day or so ago. She seemed good and pleased enough.”
“That’s good. I wonder sometimes.”
“ ’Bout what?”
“Whether all we’re doin’ is enough.”
“All you’re doin’. Me, I’m along for the ride.”
“Couldn’t do none of it without you, Eugene.”
“Yeah, well, that’s big of you to notice that. Ain’t like me to bark my own praises. Shy, retirin’ sort that I am.”
Starlight chuckled. He laid the lubricating gun down at his side and turned his head and looked over at Roth under the wagon. They were both content to lay there without moving.
“I’m gonna need ya to be around us lots when we go out again on the weekend.”
“You know I’m all in on that.”
“I know. I’m just sayin’.”
“I figured you was movin’ toward some degree of import.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, ya get kinda high-strung when there’s weighty matters comin’.”
“High-strung? I don’t know as I ever felt wired up, ever.”
“Ya get that way. Ya do. I known ya three years, Frank. We share the same roof, sit by the same fire. I’m savvy enough after all that time to know the signs.”
“Oh, so there’s signs now, is there? I’d be pleased to know what they might be.”
“My pleasure. Good for you to know that there’s someone eyeballin’ yer behaviour now and then. And me I got a shrewd, calculatin’ eye, myself.”
“And this shrewd eyeball tells you what?”
Roth turned his head and gazed directly at him. He rubbed at the nub of his chin and smeared a run of grease across it. “See, the thing is, ya gotta learn to read a man like ya would a woman. Now, yer normal women got a run of pure inconsistencies to ’em. Like the bush ya haul me out into all the time. I’ll give ya credit that you got a way with the land that’s right uncommon and that’s good, but ya ain’t got such a good eye toward how ya walk about it. Same thing as a woman. Savvy?”
Starlight smiled despite himself. “I’m not real sure I do, no.”
“Well, try’n follow along best ya can,” Roth said and winked. He rolled over on his side and tucked an arm under the side of his head and stared at Starlight earnestly. “I know it might be hard for you given the startlin’ depth of pure thought I lean toward every now and again. But here’s the thing. Ya watch a woman. Now she’s all concerned about how yer watchin’. It’s how come they attach so much to lookin’ pretty. On accounta she know’s yer eye’s on her. That keepin’ tuned to you and keepin’ tuned to herself leads her to make all kinds of moves that tell you who she really is. Same as you.”
“Same as me how?” Starlight asked.
“Well, fortunately for you you ain’t pretty, so you never had to pay no particular attention to that part of this equation.”
“Yeah. I feel real good about that.”
Roth nodded. “But what ya do is wonder if the moves ya make are the right ones. Makes ya all grave and serious. Ya lose that sparklin’ youthful glow ya normally carry. Like when yer tryin’ to suss where to drop your night line fer fish. A devil-may-care guy like me who just knows he’s pretty wouldn’t get all scrunched about the eyeballs like you do about it. I just throw a worm on the hook and toss it on out there. But you got to determine what to do. And that’s when yer easy to read.”
“Scrunched about the eyeballs?” Starlight smirked.
“Yeah, yeah. That’s one of yer tells, yeah.”
“I’m glad to know ya can know me so good.”
“Told ya. Shrewd and calculatin’. And it leads me to knowing here that whatever it is you’re thinkin’ is best is generally gonna be the best. So stop worryin’ it sore.”
“I haven’t told ya what I’m gonna do.”
“Ain’t no need, pal. You got you one pure outta this world knowin’ about the goin’s on of the real world. That world out there, I mean. Beyond them hills. I figure you just stick with what works an’ you ain’t ever gonna be off the mark.”
“Stick with the one what brung ya?” Starlight asked with a grin.
“Now, see,” Roth said and pointed a finger at him animatedly. “That there is pure genius. Yer ability to hear wise words when they’re spoken around ya.”
Starlight shook his head and turned to the work again.
* * *
—
They prepared to ride off in the dying heat of late afternoon. The sun was sweeping downward into a deeper yellow and the horses were excited and Emmy could feel the energy of them as she stood by the fence and watched him pack the second mare. They weren’t taking much. He’d told her they were heading out to wilder country and the seeming lack of necessities worried her. She found herself staring outward at the thick mat of forest that covered the ridges and the sh
oulders of the peaks and wondered what it would feel like to step completely out of the world, to feel the scarp of mountain shut you off from everything you recognized and the quiet of things seeping into you like a draught in an empty room. It scared her some but she shook it off. When he walked the horses over she stepped up on the rail and mounted the mare and sat calmly waiting on him to help the girl up. When they were both settled Starlight and Roth made final preparations and closed the door on the barn and walked over to their mounts and stepped up on the stirrup and swung their legs over in tandem and sat blinking in the slanted beam of the sun. They nudged the horses forward together and walked through the gate and out onto the small green plain of the pasture. Roth leaned down to close the gate to the pen and looked at her and arched an eyebrow and nudged his gelding forward. Her mare tucked in behind and they walked out across the field. Winnie rode behind her and Starlight brought up the rear. There was no wind. The hard bake of the pasture pulled beads of sweat from her and she wiped her forearm across her brow and settled deeper into the languid walk of the horse. Ahead of them the trees sat resolute and the shadows were deep and thick as smudge marks. The motion of the horse lulled her and she sat relaxed and slouching and turned back to look at Starlight, who measured her from toe to chin and nodded and gave her a small grin. He chucked to the gelding and pulled up beside Roth and the walk quickened. When they reached the trailhead they trotted along the curving slant and she felt the land become wild around her.
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